This cannot be the ultimatum. Music must
hold in its own bosom its own interpretation, and man must have in his
its corresponding susceptibilities. Music is language, and language
implies a people who employ and understand it. But music, even by its
professor, is as yet faintly understood. Its meanings go on crutches.
They must be helped out by words. What does this piece say to you?
Interpret it. You cannot. You must be taught much before you can know
all. It must be translated from music into speech before you can
entirely assimilate it. Musicians do not trust alone to notes for
moods. Their light shines only through a glass darkly. But in some
other sphere, in some happier time, in a world where gross wants shall
have disappeared, and therefore the grossness of words shall be no
longer necessary, where hunger and thirst and cold and care and passion
have no more admittance, and only love and faith and hope and
admiration and aspiration, shall crave utterance, in that blessed
unseen world shall not music be the everyday speech, conveying meaning
not only with a sweetness, but with an accuracy, delicacy, and
distinctness, of which we have now but a faint conception? Here words
are not only rough, but ambiguous. There harmonies shall be minutely
intelligible. Speak with what directness we can, be as explanatory,
emphatic, illustrative as we may, there are mistakes,
misunderstandings, many and grievous, and consequent missteps and
catastrophes. But in that other world language shall be exactly
coexistent with life; music shall be precisely adequate to meaning.
There shall be no hidden corners, no bungling incompatibilities, but
the searching sound penetrates into the secret sources of the soul,
all-pervading. Not a nook, not a crevice, no maze so intricate, but
the sound floats in to gather up fragrant aroma, to bear it yonder to
another waiting soul, and deposit it as deftly by unerring magnetisms
in the corresponding clefts.

Toot away, then, fifer-fellow! Turn your slow crank, inexorable
Italian! Thrum your thrums, Miss Laura, for Signor Bernadotti! You
are a way off, but your footprints point the right way. With many a
yawn and sigh subjective, I greatly fear me, many a malediction
objective, you are "learning the language of another world." To us,
huddled together in our little ant-hill, one is "une bete," and one is
"mon ange"; but from that fixed star we are all so far to have no
parallax.